ASCII Art Generator Beta Test

Wow, been a while since I've visited the forums! Glad to see the progress on the site.

Last night I decided I wanted to re-program an old ASCII art app I made in METAL Basic about 7 years ago, and make it ready for the mac app store. Two long coding sessions later I have a beta, and I'd love some feedback if anyone has any. Here is the page

I can provide serial numbers for a day or two if anyone is interested. I'd like to hammer out any remaining bugs and make a few minor improvements, then announce version 1.0 and submit a build to the Mac app store.

I think one thing I need to do first is make the preview window auto-resize to the size of the finished text.

my suggestions:
1) the image well should allow me to drag an image onto it
2) I shouldn't have to click the preview button to see the outcome. I mean, it's pretty freaking fast generating. just make it live.
3) Register is not a main feature of your program and should not be a button smack dab in the middle of everything
4) remove unneeded menu items
5) is there reason for the 512 max width restriction? seems unnecessary to place a restriction like that

(Jan 24, 2011 08:32 PM)skyhawk Wrote: my suggestions:
1) the image well should allow me to drag an image onto it
2) I shouldn't have to click the preview button to see the outcome. I mean, it's pretty freaking fast generating. just make it live.
3) Register is not a main feature of your program and should not be a button smack dab in the middle of everything
4) remove unneeded menu items
5) is there reason for the 512 max width restriction? seems unnecessary to place a restriction like that

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll get to them these next few days

1. Definitely
2. I'll consider this. It's fast for some things, but try a 300+ color preview and it takes a few seconds. I'll probably add that and multithreading for 1.1
3. It is if you're trying to get people to buy it . Button disappears after entering a serial
4. Good Call
5. Probably not, that would be a pretty big output file!

2) multithreading would be baller, as I have 8 processors, and lots of ram... let me CRUNCH YOUR FACE!
6) if something takes a long time to calculate, at the very least show a progress bar (totally tried 512 and colors).
7) preview box should be scrollable

(Jan 24, 2011 09:12 PM)skyhawk Wrote: 2) multithreading would be baller, as I have 8 processors, and lots of ram... let me CRUNCH YOUR FACE!
6) if something takes a long time to calculate, at the very least show a progress bar (totally tried 512 and colors).
7) preview box should be scrollable

1. Done, and you can drag images into the doc icon
2. Definitely, though I'm surprised how I get near 100% CPU usage on my quad core iMac.
4. Done
6. Definitely, adding at least one extra thread will make the UI respond while calculating
7. Yeah, I feel like some users may miss the resize corner, though in the current version I just uploaded it should auto-resize the window

Crashed on me.. Am I so horrible looking? Ah I see, your program does ASCII and not Shift_JIS. Just kidding.

* Allow for multiple pictures to be loaded for ASCII animation
* Allow for color palettes to be loaded. For example maybe I just want hues of red
* Since SkyHawk has 128 cores on his machine, can you make a plugin so we can do realtime video to ASCII conversation via iChat?
* Might use some CoreImage filters in this. Like some kind of polarization just before turning into ASCII
* Once it makes an image, you should be able to save the 'settings' you selected used in a kind of scratchpad. So you can go back and view different settings. For example, I might want to try 'xo' in one try or 'c' in another
* I'd like to see the interface of the app have 3 versions. Apple guidelines as now, Kid interface and Retro 80s. With Retro 80's, when displaying the output, have it print from a dot-matrix printer.
* Have a selection tool so that certain areas can be outputted (so I don't have to crop images)
* Some kind of auto uploader to various social sites?
* Have some presets for output that looks like it was displayed on C64, Apple 2E, CoCo, Amiga, etc

(Jan 25, 2011 05:31 PM)Carlos Camacho Wrote: * Since SkyHawk has 128 cores on his machine, can you make a plugin so we can do realtime video to ASCII conversation via iChat?
* Might use some CoreImage filters in this. Like some kind of polarization just before turning into ASCII

Skyhawk, good simple idea. You can select all and change it yourself with command-t once it's previewed, but good option in the main menu.

Carlos, it does have facial identification features and exits when appropriate . All good suggestions though, I have a too do list going with everything here, and if it sells more than a few copies when it hits the mac app store I'll keep adding them. CoreImage seems like the way to go I guess.

PowerMacX, great link, I just wasted about 15 minutes playing with the hidden photo booth features. I hope apple un-hides them sometime, probably saving them for lion now or something. I ran that image on my new iMac and it took a little while but didn't crash. I probably (definitely) need to do some more optimization, or at least show a status bar and prevent it from crashing.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll start throwing these fixes/features in later this week